One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,39

revelation. She had often wondered but never known. “I didn’t wish to appear unseemly in my haste, however. So I waited…too long, as it turns out. I only wish that you…” She paused and shook her head. “I will not always be here to protect you, my dear.”

“Protect me from what, Mama?”

“The world, I suppose,” she replied with a self-deprecating little laugh. “Just as you wish to protect your sons.” Amanda stiffened at the comparison. “As a child, even as a young woman, you were like Philip—impulsive, a bit of a thrill-seeker,” she continued fondly. “But of course a lady mustn’t—”

Amanda was quite familiar with the list of things a lady mustn’t do. Fortunately, Mama was interrupted by the sound of voices in the hall. George had arrived.

“I should go,” Mama insisted. “I would not wish to intrude.”

“Don’t forget your book.” Amanda gestured toward a curved-leg table, its marquetry top almost entirely covered by the volume her mother had laid upon it.

“I’ll—I’ll come back later for it.”

Then Lewis was opening the door and George was coming in, greeting her mother as she slipped past, out of the library. Amanda hadn’t a moment to dart across the room and station herself behind the desk, as she’d planned. She had no choice but to smile and invite him to sit down on the sofa her mother had just vacated, while she perched herself on the edge of a nearby chair.

“I suppose,” George began, settling himself and looking about the room, “this is a fitting spot to discuss schooling.” With a lazy, almost possessive hand, he picked up the book her mother had abandoned, raised an eyebrow at the title—Proper Drainage and Cultivation of Fens and Marshland or some such thing, she felt sure, given the shelf from which it had been ignorantly plucked—and tossed it back where he’d found it, making the delicate table shudder beneath its weight.

“Er…yes,” she agreed, instantly regretting she had not made him climb four flights to the schoolroom and sit on an unforgiving wooden stool instead.

“Though there’s a good deal more to a boy’s education than books, ma’am.” He brought his gaze to her as he spoke, and her own fell to her hands, folded in her lap. “But I wouldn’t expect a lady to understand that.”

The demure interlacing of her fingers tautened into a painful knot. “I assure you, my lord, I am quite capable of understanding a great many things, especially where my sons are concerned.”

“Then you must know young Kingston will be well-served at Harrow, as his father and I were. It will be the making of him—as a man, I mean. He needs toughening up.”

She started to protest that she did not want Jamie to be tough. Tough was for old shoe leather and the woody ends of asparagus. But George thought in absolutes, in stark alternatives, and she would not sit here and listen to him deride her son for being soft.

“I have a proposal,” she said instead. “An alternative to sending Jamie off alone this September.”

George slid across the silk damask cushions of the sofa, until he was at the end closest to where she sat. “I too have a proposal, Lady Kingston—Amanda, if I may.” He reached out for her hand, but she could not seem to make her fingers disentangle themselves from one another. “Say yes, and in future, I’ll gladly defer to your wishes about your sons.”

At first she thought the ruckus she heard was the rattle of her pulse, the steady beat of botherbotherbother through her skull. George’s clumsy offer of marriage did not surprise her. But his offer regarding Jamie and Philip…? Oh, she couldn’t think clearly, didn’t know what she ought to answer him. Why should keeping her children with her require her to give up both body and soul?

“I do beg your pardon, Lady Kingston.” Lewis was at the door, bowing more than usually low, and when he straightened, his cheeks were pink with embarrassment. “But this gentleman insisted you would want to see him right away. I did tell him you were occupied with Lord Dulsworthy, but he—”

“Do your job, boy,” growled George, his evident frustration jerking him from his seat. Amanda rose too.

Then another voice slipped into the room above the others. “Forgive me, my lady.”

Amanda searched past Lewis’s shoulder for the source of that voice.

At first she had thought the entire interruption might be a figment of her imagination, part of her brain’s feeble attempt to keep her from having to